“President Biden was caught on a hot mic Monday appearing to call Fox News reporter Peter Doocy a “stupid son of a bitch” in response to a question asked at the start of a White House event on lowering the prices of consumer goods,” AOL News reported on Monday, January 24, 20[...]
Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
Is the Big Quit actually a mass strike?
America experienced mass strikes after the end of both world wars. For example, in 1946, 10% of the U.S. workforce struck employers. The reason? Companies had made a lot of money during the war, and they wanted their share. What makes a “mass strike” different from an ordinary strike is [...]
Making sense of Supreme Court’s vaccine ruling
The Supreme Court issued a baffling ruling on Thursday upholding Biden’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers in facilities receiving Medicare or Medicaid funds, but struck down an OSHA rule that covered the employers of 80 million American workers. The next day, Friday, January 14, 2022, fo[...]
The failure of GOP trickle-down economics
Trickle-down economics, instituted by Reagan and pursued by every GOP administration since, is a core Republican belief. That’s the idea that cutting taxes for the rich will create prosperity for everyone, by “trickling down” to those lower on the economic scale. (Think workers get[...]
What should the Democrats’ midterm strategy be?
As Democrats try to shape a strategy for midterm elections they’re widely expected to lose, they’re debating whether they should talk to voters about the January 6 insurrection or the economy. (Read story here.) The stakes are high. The GOP has been taken over by fanatics who don’t[...]
When 1-3 is a majority, until it isn’t
Trump’s FDIC chair, Jelena McWilliams, wasn’t ousted; she quit. (Story here.) The FDIC is the federal agency that insures bank deposits (details here). McWilliams was appointed in 2018 to a 5-year term expiring in 2023. By December 2021, she was the only Republican on the 5-member board,[...]
Minimum wage hikes on 1/1/22
States raising minimum wage on Jan. 1, 2022: Arizona: $12.15 to $12.80 California: $14 to $15 for large employers, $13 to $14 for small employers Colorado: $12.32 to $12.56 Delaware: $9.25 to $10.50 Illinois: $11 to $12 Maine: $12.15 to $12.75 Maryland: $11.75 to $12.50 for large employers, $11.60 t[...]
The grandma who killed everyone else’s child care
Manchin refuses to support Biden’s “Build Back Better” social program partly because he thinks mothers would use child tax credit payments for drugs. When a volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker group) who “attended a meeting with about a dozen other adv[...]
December 20th, 2021 - 1:03 am § in Economics, Foreign Affairs
Economics lesson, Turkish edition (video)
Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s rightwing dictator, thinks he can tell his country’s economy what to do. His economic theories are described as “unorthodox” (details here). Watch the video below to see what happens when a blockhead head-butts against natural economic forces. Return t[...]
Psychologist: “America is not well”
The capitalist system demands that you work, come hell or high water. But “for a moment in early 2020, it seemed like we might get a break from capitalism,” a Vox article says (read it here). It continues, “A novel coronavirus was sweeping the globe, and leaders and experts recomme[...]